Krauthammer: FOX News should be proud that we annoy Obama so much

posted at 1:11 pm on January 29, 2013 by Erika Johnsen

As we heard in President Obama’s recent interview with TNR, the White House’s irritation with FOX News and rightward-leaning media outlets continues unabated — but as Charles Krauthammer pointed out last night, that should be more of a source of pride than anything else. Nothing says success quite like your competition’s outspoken annoyance:

I love to hear the president whine about FOX News and talk radio. I think we ought to be proud of the fact that we annoy him so much. If you look at the line-up on one side, the liberal media, you start with ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, PBS, MSNBC, the elite newspapers, the one remaining news magazine, the universities, Hollywood — it doesn’t stop anywhere. And on the other side, talk radio, FOX News. And they can’t stand the fact that they no longer have a monopoly.

So, I think it ought to be taken as a compliment. What I’ve always said about Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch, their genius was understanding and locating a niche audience in broadcast cable news, which is half the American people. The half that have suffered for decades by the fact you get the news presented from a single perspective over and over again.

Finally, the fact that there is a new perspective, talk radio and FOX, and they can’t stand it. It’s a source of pride, I would say.

Sure, everybody’s got their biases (although, as Tucker Carlson lamented in a recent interview, it’s the sources that claim to be fully objective that present the really insidious problem), but general wisdom holds that a little competition never hurt anybody — unless, of course, that competition happens to pose inconveniently tough questions about the real-world consequences of your agenda to the biggest audience in cable news. To hear certain Democrats tell it, our out-of-control debt and spending problems are apparently just a figment of FOX News’ imagination, or something. Oof: